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Ecuador: From Marxist guerrilla to pro-Correa parliamentarian – the life of Rosa Mireya Cardenas

The room was dark, cold and dirty. Rats scurried past her naked body, climbing over her legs, trying to reach the pieces of bread scattered around her.

But she could not move or cry. Otherwise, she was told, the dogs would bite.

They had placed cold water to drip on her head and had left a pack of dogs to attack her if she tried to get up.

The days of electrocution, physical beatings and no food and water eventually tore her down.

“I was convinced I was going to die there, I even decided I was going to die there,” Rosa Mireya Cardenas recalled more than three decades later.

It was the summer of 1984 and Cardenas, en route from Panama to Nicaragua, was captured by what she believes were CIA agents at the Juan Santamaria airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. Taken to a safe house, she was physically and psychologically tortured for eight days straight.

In the spring of 1983, the union of students, workers, campesinos, socialists, communists and others from the revolutionary left sought to fill what they perceived as a void of political leadership, just a year before “the most repressive government in Ecuador’s history” came to power.

“(There) existed in the popular movement … scattered union struggles and guilds, local peasant movements without a national cause,” explained Cardenas, adding that even “during the insurgent struggle we never deviate(d) from a political objective.”

And it was years after the brutality of Febres-Cordero’s rule that Correa’s government, elected in 2006, set up the Truth Commission, carving out space for AVC members and other torture victims from Ecuador’s most repressive era to seek some semblance of justice.

CIA torture

It was after first being tortured in the safe house in Costa Rica, and then by the Ecuadorian military, that Cardenas speculated that the torture tactics she endured were the same used under Operation Condor.

Operation Condor was a covert but coordinated US-backed regional counterinsurgency strategy that assassinated and disappeared thousands of left-wing activists across multiple countries in the 1970s and ’80s in the name of propping up right-wing dictatorships in South America and quashing the threat of communist expansion.

“After eight days, they sent me back to Ecuador, without any legal basis and they placed me again in the hands of the Ecuador military. And here in the barracks, it was an underground building, they applied the same tactics that they used in Costa Rica — no food, no sleep, putting cold water and electrocuting me, they laughed at me, made fun of me,” she recalled.

Indeed, the quarters where Cardenas endured physical and psychological brutality in Ecuador was a torture lab built using a CIA manual.

While Ecuador has never officially been linked to Operation Condor, evidence alarmingly suggests otherwise.

A report released in 2010 by the Truth Commission found that 68% of the 456 victims who endured violent human rights violations between 1984 and 2008 were brutalised under the government of Febres-Cordero, in power from 1984 to 1988.

Detained for another five months in Quito and charged with illicit association, Cardenas regained her freedom in January 1985 after being declared innocent by judges.

'Alfarismo' and the Citizen’s Revolution

In her early years with AVC, Cardenas travelled from Nicaragua, where she worked alongside the Sandinista National Liberation Front, to Libya, where she received political and military training.

AVC’s goal was to recover Alfarismo — the legacy of Eloy Alfaro, president of Ecuador from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911, and his revolutionary spirit.

“What is Alfaro Vive’s contribution? It is precisely to piece together the image of Eloy Alfaro, to show that Alfaro’s struggle was a struggle of the people, not of the elites, to bring back these objectives which we continue to fight for,” Cardenas said.

The group worked for years to assimilate back into civilian life, working with human rights and cultural organisations to dispel their reputation of violence that was propagated by the Febres-Cordero regime.

But it was through the work of the Truth Commission that Ecuadorians learned of the brutality its members faced at the hands of the state.

“The space created by the Truth Commission was important to integrate us into the … Citizens’ Revolution, which opened up large spaces for participation, mobilisation and social organisation through the Constituent Assembly,” explained Cardenas, referring to the process that rewrote Ecuador’s constitution in 2008.

She said the aims of AVC in 1983 were mirrored in Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution, the program of progressive social and economic transformation launched under the banner of 21st century socialism when his government took office in 2007.

They were both inspired by Eloy Alfaro’s radical Liberal Revolution and interested in “democracy, social justice, economic independence, national sovereignty and Latin American unity.”

AVC members, alongside other victims, were given a space in the government’s Support Committee, created in May 2007. Over the years, they have poured over confidential state files from that period.

Since then, a reparation process has seen been set up for the victims of Febres-Cordero’s government, consisting of “the prosecution and punishment of perpetrators, the dignification of memory and possible economic compensation”, said Cardenas.

A struggle against history

In the Andean Parliament as a member of PAIS Alliance, Correa’s left-wing party, Cardenas will be working to promote gender equality, fair trade and the work of social organisations, among other initiatives.

But with Ecuador’s second round of presidential elections slated to take place on April 2, the country stands at a critical crossroads.

South America’s leftist resurgence — commonly referred to as the Pink Tide — has seen recent blows, with neoliberal governments in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil rolling back progressive gains of recent years.

If neoliberal, right-wing former banker Guillermo Lasso is elected president, Ecuador would be set to follow the same path.

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